The Last Roll Call: The 29th Infantry Division Victorious, 1945

Summary

Joseph Balkoski concludes his landmark series on the U.S. 29th Infantry Division in World War II with the story of the 29ers during the war's final five months. Opening with the division's participation in Operation Grenade, Balkoski follows the 29ers through the crossing of the Roer River, the blitzkrieg-style drive across the Rhineland to the Rhi

THE LAST ROLL CALL

The 29th Infantry Division Victorious, 1945

Joseph Balkoski

STACKPOLE BOOKS

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14. 29th Division: Rear-area Protection and Military Government, April 8–18

15. 29th Division in Central Germany, April–May 1945

16. 175th Infantry, April 20–25

17. 29th Division, April 20–25

18. 1st Battalion, 115th Infantry, April 21

19. 116th Infantry, April 24

20. Surrender of Division z.V., May 2

21. 29th Division: First Meeting with the Red Army, May 2

22. 29th Division: Bremen Enclave, May 1945–January 1946

23. Bremen: Old City, 1945

Introduction: 29, Let's Go!

Nearly one-third of a century has passed since I began documenting the World War II history of the 29th Infantry Division. In this, the fifth and final volume of the 29th Division's World War II history, the story picks up where Volume IV, Our Tortured Souls, ended, on New Year's Eve 1944, opposite Jülich, Germany, on the banks of the Roer River. Compared to what was transpiring forty miles to the south in the Ardennes during the massive German offensive that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge—from which the Allied high command had mercifully spared the 29th Division—the Jülich front was tranquil: at worst, the 29ers endured sporadic German barrages; now and then they ran patrols across the icy Roer to snoop on the enemy.

But every 29er realized that sooner or later the Allies would take the offensive again: it was just a question of when and where. The 29th Division had been within rifle-shot range of Jülich since late November 1944, when that historic city with Roman origins was a major Allied steppingstone on the road to the Rhine River and ultimately Berlin. That autumn, the enemy had masterfully held back the American juggernaut on the Roer far short of the Rhine, and when the Germans’ Ardennes offensive erupted on December 16, Eisenhower reluctantly abandoned any further ideas of reaching the Rhine by Christmas. But nothing had altered Ike's conviction that the Allies would eventually deliver the coup de grâce against the enemy on the northern part of the Western Front in that area of the Rhineland known as the Cologne Plain. When the enemy's Ardennes effort petered out and the weather cleared, the 29th Division stood poised to participate in what Eisenhower hoped would mark the denouement of the European war. This would mark the fourth time since D-Day, only eight months in the past, that the 29th would be at the forefront of a major Anglo-American offensive.

And there our story begins…

29th INFANTRY DIVISION ORGANIZATION

In January 1945, the core of the 14,000-man 29th Infantry Division consisted of its three infantry regiments: 115th (1st Maryland), 116th (Stonewall Brigade), and 175th (5th Maryland). According to a venerable U.S. Army custom, the word regiment is considered superfluous when designating units of regimental size, and thus references in this book such as 115th Infantry always imply regiments.

A regiment was configured into three 870-man battalions, designated 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, typically commanded by a major or lieutenant colonel. Battalions in turn were broken down into companies: A, B, C, and D in the 1st; E, F, G, and H in the 2nd; I, K, L, and M in the 3rd. (U.S. Army regiments never had a J Company.) Companies D, H, and M were heavy weapons companies, armed with six 81-millimeter mortars and eight machine guns. All other lettered companies were rifle companies. Each battalion also contained a headquarters company of 126 men.

Rifle companies were organized into three forty-one-man rifle platoons and a single thirty-five-man weapons platoon, equipped with three 60-millimeter mortars and two machine guns. In turn, each rifle platoon was broken down into three twelve-man rifle squads and a five-man platoon headquarters. Led by a staff sergeant, a rifle squad was equipped with eleven M-1 Garand rifles and a single Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR).

The 29th Division also included thousands of non-infantry soldiers, among them artillerymen, engineers, cavalrymen, military policemen, signalmen, and musicians, as well as medical, ordnance, and quartermaster personnel.

29th INFANTRY DIVISION, FEBRUARY 23, 1945

ONE

We've Come a Hell of a Way

BITTER DELAYING ACTION

The GIs had to admit that this down-on-his-luck Jerry had guts.

True, he was just one in a seemingly endless stream of shuffling ex-Supermen dragged before their American interrogators in late autumn 1944, sullenly handing over their Soldbücher—identification books—while mumbling disjointed responses to pressing questions posed by prying intelligence officers. Nazi Germany at this stage of the war was obviously careening like a runaway train toward a calamitous fate, and since the Normandy breakout zealous Allied generals had been searching futilely for clues that the German Army was finally ready to crack. Would that glorious event occur soon? The latest batch of German prisoners might provide hints that the long-awaited crackup was imminent; the sooner the Americans could interrogate them, the higher the chance German tongues would loosen due to the usual stupefaction brought on by recent combat.

This curious German prisoner brought before a U.S. Ninth Army intelligence team most assuredly spoke with a loose tongue, but he displayed neither disjointedness nor stupefaction. Rather than attempting to ingratiate himself with his interrogators, an approach to which terrified German prisoners commonly resorted, he gamely spoke his mind on the current military situation in Europe. I am thoroughly convinced Germany is going to win the war, he declared unhesitatingly to his astonished captors. The Americans naturally wanted to know how: would success come from the rumored series of wunderwaffen—wonder weapons—under development? With a shrug, the German replied, Perhaps that is going to come one day…[but] what I need as an infantryman, I have. The issue was, at least to him, as simple as that. As he was dismissed for transportation to a prisoner-of-war camp, he growled to his enemies, "Nicht alle soldaten sind mutlos"—Not all [German] soldiers are despondent.

Indeed, when on December 16, 1944, Hitler launched his bold offensive in the Ardennes—an assault carried out on such a grand scale that Eisenhower understated the case when he confessed the Allies were surprised by the strength of his attack—for a fleeting interval the number of despondent German soldaten diminished by a considerable factor. But less than two weeks later, during one of his notorious harangues at a December 28 General Staff conference at the Adlerhorst command complex in Hesse, even Hitler had to admit, The offensive didn't succeed…. Unfortunately it didn't lead to the decisive success we might have expected. However, he emphasized: I want to add right away, gentlemen, that when I say this, don't conclude that I've had even the slightest thought of losing this war. I never in my life learned the meaning of the term ‘capitulation,’ and I'm one of those men who has worked himself up from nothing.

And back to nothing the Allies were resolved he soon would return, despite his confidence that Nazi Germany would retain the initiative in the new year, 1945: Offensive operations alone can turn the war in the West in a successful direction, he insisted. On December 31, he strove to prove that point by launching another major assault, Unternehmen Nordwind—Operation North Wind—against the U.S. Seventh Army's thinly held lines in Alsace. I am already preparing a third strike, he boasted. In the air, on New Year's Day, the Luftwaffe undertook one of its largest raids of the war by hurling more than 1,000 aircraft against Allied airfields in Belgium and Holland, an aerial assault known in Germany as Unternehmen Bodenplatte—Operation Baseplate—but later christened the Hangover Raid by the Americans. None of those Nazi initiatives accomplished anything more than killing and wounding thousands on both sides, capturing limited amounts of inconsequential real estate, and postponing Nazi Germany's inevitable demise by a few weeks at most. Indeed, the aged Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander-in-chief of German forces in the West, described the failed Ardennes Offensive as Stalingrad Number Two; the legendary Luftwaffe flier, Gen. Adolf Galland, noted that Baseplate was the German Air Force's death blow.

Still, as the anonymous infantryman brought before Ninth Army interrogators had insisted, not all German soldiers were despondent. On one point Hitler was wholly correct: There is no doubt that the brief offensives we've already made have led to an immediate easing up of the situation along the whole front, he pronounced. The enemy has had to give up all his offensive plans. He's been forced to reorganize completely. He has had to redeploy units that were worn out. His operational intentions have been totally thrown out…. The psychological moment is against him.

Even Ike would have concurred; the Ardennes struggle had changed everything. On New Year's Day, the Western Front stretched for 530 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border. Viewed on a map, the front line was anything but tidy, zigging and zagging across Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Germany, looking more like a stock exchange graph than an orderly line drawn by a staff officer's grease pencil on a map overlay. Of those many zigs and zags, the most prominent by far were in the Western Front's central zone, the notorious Ardennes, the sector now portrayed daily on stateside newspapers’ front-page maps, simply labeled the Bulge.

As the Bulge contracted perceptibly in the first week of 1945, even a military neophyte could discern that the Germans’ best chance for turning the war around had evaporated. Would the Allies now resume their efforts to bring down Nazi Germany from the moment the enemy's Ardennes offensive had interrupted them? Or would Eisenhower's armies—as Hitler had claimed—reorganize completely and rethink their operational intentions?

Whatever Ike decided, he must set out to do it in the face of oppressive time pressure. The Allies were already far behind schedule: Eisenhower's boss, Gen. George C. Marshall, had directed him in an October 23 cable to conduct operations with the objective of completing the defeat of Germany by January 1. The Allies’ late 1944 offensives on Germany's western frontier had utterly failed to bring about Marshall's goal, encountering not only indomitable enemy resistance but also gloomy weather that had caused thousands of debilitating cases of trench foot, to the shock of Allied generals and medical men alike. Little more German territory was under Allied occupation in early January 1945 than ten weeks before. Further, to no one's surprise, January weather shaped up as far more severe than in late autumn. As for the enemy's defiance, the ongoing Ardennes offensive established beyond doubt that Germany was far from defeated. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, had spoken for most Germans when he declared in the autumn: Germany will go on fighting because there is nothing else to do.

The outlook on the Western Front for the Allies had become so dire that Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. Twelfth Army Group, had blurted to a fellow general just days before the enemy came surging out of the Ardennes forest, It is entirely possible for the Germans to fight bitter delaying actions until January 1, 1946. Such a pessimistic prognostication on New Year's Day 1945 seemed almost inconceivable: fighting bitter battles for another year would not only sap the spirit from front-line GIs, but also strain the resolution of housewives, war workers, politicians, and desk generals on the home front. As Marshall would later remark: You cannot have such a protracted struggle in a democracy in the face of mounting casualties…. Speed was essential.

In the early days of the new year, a distressed Marshall looked in vain for exhibitions of decisive military operations on the part of Ike's generals. Marshall also had to manage an even more distant war, the one in the Pacific; unless the Allies could soon fulfill the Germany First strategy that four years ago President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had resolved would be the rock-solid foundation of Allied military operations in World War II, the Pacific war could develop into an island-by-island bloodbath with accompanying casualty lists longer than anyone in the Pentagon dared to imagine. Could the American people take it? Even the irrepressibly upbeat Roosevelt allowed a rare admission of negativity to creep into his January 6 State of the Union report when he notified Americans: The year ended with a setback for our arms.

Perhaps that setback was merely the proverbial darkest hour before the dawn. Final victory over Hitler was close, so tantalizingly close, a theme touched on by Roosevelt in his report: In Europe, we shall resume the attack and—despite temporary setbacks here or there—we shall continue the attack relentlessly until Germany is completely defeated…. Further desperate attempts may well be made to break our lines, to slow our progress. We must never make the mistake of assuming that the Germans are beaten until the last Nazi has surrendered. Concluded the president: The new year of 1945 can be the greatest year of achievement in human history…. We Americans of today, together with our allies, are making history—and I hope it will be better history than ever has been made before.

The members of the 29th Infantry Division had ringside seats on New Year's Day for a spectacular aerial show the likes of which they had never seen before. Since landing on the sands of Omaha Beach in the opening minutes of the D-Day invasion, the most they had glimpsed of the German Air Force at any given time was a smattering of warplanes, usually just one or two, generally headed home. Allied dominance of the air was so complete that the 29ers had gotten thoroughly used to making the assumption that any group of planes flying over the front lines had to be their own. But on January 1, 1945, the 29th Division held the line directly underneath the flight path of the Hangover Raid, the Luftwaffe's last-ditch effort to challenge Allied control of the skies in western Europe. More than 1,000 German aircraft—mostly fighters piloted by officers fresh from New Year's Eve fêtes and still attired in unspoiled formal dress uniforms with white gloves and gleaming shoes—took to the air at dawn and headed for sixteen Allied airfields close behind the front, endeavoring to splatter their bombs across runways and, with luck, catch as many parked Thunderbolts, Typhoons, Spitfires, and Mustangs as possible. If the raid worked as well as it looked on paper, Allied tactical air power on the Western Front could be crippled for weeks.

But it did not work. The Luftwaffe top brass timed the raid to exploit their opponents’ presumed lack of vigilance following a night of New Year's Eve revelry. The alert 29ers, however, were hardly fooled; nor were any Allied troops occupying front-line positions athwart the enemy's flight lines, for what passed for revels in spartan, bombed-out command posts anywhere near the front could only barely be categorized as distractions. One 29er who spent the night several miles behind the front noted in a V-mail letter to his wife, I celebrated New Year's Eve last night by drinking the last of the second Coke you sent me.

Luckily, for the past two months the 29th Division had the services of an attached outfit, the 554th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion, led by Lt. Col. Lawrence Linderer, which had trained for years to shoot down German planes with 40-millimeter guns, built by Chrysler, and half-track–mounted quadruple .50-caliber machine guns. Never before, however, had Linderer's men fired their weapons with the abandon they displayed on New Year's Day. The 554th perceived that the wily enemy was up to no good just a few minutes after midnight, when a couple of German twin-engine night fighters flew low over American lines, dropping flares and a few bombs behind the front—for what object the GIs had yet to discern. Eventually the men correctly surmised that these were pathfinders, heralds of a rapidly approaching storm. The tempest arrived at 9:00 A.M.; Linderer reported that all planes entered the area from the east at tree-top level, thereby rendering ineffective the local radar air-warning units. No early warning was possible until the flights had actually entered territory visible from local observation posts and gun pits.

Quadruple .50-caliber machine guns mounted on a half-track in a U.S. Army antiaircraft unit.

To the 29ers, it seemed as if the irresolute German pilots just flew around aimlessly…seemingly without any grouping or coordination. Many of them simply roared over 29th Division lines and disappeared, but occasionally Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs streaked in at remarkably low altitudes to strafe or bomb supposed targets in and around the checkerboard Rhineland villages behind the 29th's lines. Flying that low over highly trained American antiaircraft gunners, however, guaranteed that the Germans would get hurt. The amazed GIs had never seen such enticing targets, and every weapon—quad .50s, 40-millimeter Bofors, and even M-1 rifles and BARs—blazed away amid a cacophony that could be heard for miles. It was the type of noise—like a rapid fire jackhammer—that antiaircraft men loved to hear, and when the last of the enemy planes vanished an hour later, six of them remained behind as flaming wrecks on the flat Rhineland farmland. The 116th Infantry's operations officer, Maj. Fred McManaway, reported to the 29th Division war room that one of them was a Focke-Wulf 190 down at 975585 [a map coordinate, near Dürboslar]. I am sending graves registration people up there with a basket—the pilot is sort of smashed up.

One 29er wrote to his wife: This morning I saw three Jerry planes shot down by our ack-ack boys all within ten minutes—it was quite thrilling—and it was funny how the tracers of .50 calibers kept going up even after the Kraut pilots were drifting down in their chutes. I guess our gunners have been reading reports of the atrocities the Germans committed down south of us [in the Ardennes]. Those dirty bastards!

Most of those pilots who managed to pass cleanly over American lines found their targets and inflicted serious damage on Allied airfields, destroying nearly 200 parked planes—one of them Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery's personal C-47. But the enemy paid a high price, losing over 200 hard-to-replace pilots killed or captured. Again, the Luftwaffe had demonstrated its versatility and aggressiveness, the U.S. Army Air Force's official history noted. [But] the evidence indicated in fact that January 1, 1945, was one of the worst single days for human and aircraft losses that the Luftwaffe ever experienced, and the military effect on the Allies, save for some embarrassment, was truly negligible.

LEARNING DEFENSIVE STUFF

The American top brass had mercifully spared the 29th Division from deployment to the Ardennes during the enemy's ravaging offensive, and now the 29ers held a lengthy and comparatively tranquil nine-mile front along the Roer River opposite Jülich, Germany, forty miles north of the Bulge's northern shoulder. Just a week before the Ardennes fighting erupted, however, the Roer front was anything but tranquil. On December 9, Ninth Army had shut down a 29th Division offensive that had endured for twenty-four grueling days at a cost of 2,600 combat and another 1,100 non-combat casualties—over one-quarter of the division's personnel as of its November 16 start date. Those staggering losses had bought a paltry terrain gain of little more than six miles, a distance a fit soldier could jog in an hour. During that offensive the 29th Division had lost a man every nine minutes—gaining on average three yards for each man lost.

With the bulk of the U.S. Army's infantry replacements heading into the Ardennes to rejuvenate the battered units fighting there, as of New Year's Day the 29th Division still had a long way to go to regain its lost combat power. Of even greater concern, however, was the spiritual impact of 19,117 battle casualties in the seven-month interval since the 29th had landed in the first wave at Omaha Beach, a stunning figure for an outfit that at full strength amounted to 14,000 men. Virtually no American military unit of comparable size had ever lost men at that lethal rate in such a brief period, an unfortunate distinction the 29ers tried their best to forget. Nevertheless, a piece of pervasive scuttlebutt spread by cynics had taken hold: the 29th Division was in truth not a division, they said, but a three-division corps—with a division in the field, a division in the hospital, and a division in the cemetery.

No one could deny that on January 1 the 29th Division was a badly beat-up outfit. But if that classification had spared it deployment to the Ardennes, then all 29ers agreed there was a silver lining to that dark cloud. Actually, the 29th had been much more severely beaten up in the past—it had lost 9,100 men in forty-six days in Normandy plus another 3,000 in twenty-six days in Brittany—but amazingly had always come back a week or so later ready to absorb more punishment and accomplish the sometimes illogical goals of its leaders. That flexibility, according to the generals, was the beauty of the American military system: a timely infusion of well-trained replacements could rejuvenate a battered division in just a few days. How many times, however, could the 29th Division be rejuvenated and still fight on? Army doctrine claimed the number was limitless. Veteran infantrymen knew it was not: it took much more than fresh bodies to make a first-class fighting unit. So far the number of times the 29th had bounced back and continued to fight with impressive tenacity had given U.S. Army generals the accurate impression that it was indeed a first-class outfit. The downside of that lofty reputation was that whenever the division completed its rejuvenation, it was certain to be in the thick of the fight again, in all likelihood in the decisive sector of the front where Ike and Bradley always wanted their best units. As the Allies were not even across the Rhine yet, and Berlin was a long way beyond that, the 29ers dreaded when their inevitable reentry into combat would come.

One 29er, division commander Maj. Gen. Charles Hunter Gerhardt, Jr., assuredly did not dread that moment, as he was convinced that the fastest way the GIs could get home was to pummel the enemy into extinction—and if pummeling was required, the 29th Division would be one of the best units to do it. Many 29ers were convinced that Uncle Charlie Gerhardt had infused the 29th with the high spirit it needed to bear the many traumas of modern warfare; probably a far greater number believed that spirit merely covered up a casualty list of inconceivable length, and even worse obscured the appalling detail that many of those casualties were suffered in battles that should not have taken place at all. Indeed, as a consequence of those high losses and some unrelated shenanigans beyond the battlefield, Gerhardt's former boss in XIX Corps, Maj. Gen. Raymond McLain, had only recently endeavored to fire him unceremoniously. However, Gerhardt's career—at least temporarily—had been saved by West Point classmates, the most important of whom was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Memories of school-time camaraderie and glorious days on the football gridiron and baseball diamond, some cynics thought, could bail out a troubled West Pointer long after he removed his cadet-gray uniform.

The general gave the 29th Division a New Year's Eve pep talk. We've come a hell of a way, Gerhardt affirmed. This division is in no mood to release any ground it has gained. The situation here is well in hand…. The division is building up its strength; this is a fortunate situation for us. We're learning some defensive stuff. The team is working together extremely well. In talking to individuals scattered all through the outfit—we're doing all right…. If we can get the people who are actually up front comfortable so they can get along, nobody has any squawks.

Gerhardt himself was used to squawking, especially when he spied a 29er improperly dressed or failing to follow military protocol to the letter. But those close to the general perceived, much to their pleasure, that he was softening. A few weeks back he had rescinded his notorious order, in effect since D-Day, that prohibited all 29th Division units from setting up a command post or living quarters indoors. Sometime later, members of the general's entourage witnessed an amazing event. On an inspection circuit near the Roer, Gerhardt spotted a jeep driven by a 29er who was wearing a wool cap rather than a helmet. Normally there would have been hell to pay, but when the general began his customary tirade, the soldier interrupted and declared, General, what do you care what kind of hat I wear, when next week we are going to cross the river and take that town [Jülich] for you? A flabbergasted Gerhardt later noted, There being no answer to this one, I wished him well and told him to go ahead.

Gerhardt would need time to absorb and acclimate a vast number of replacements and, even more important, to obtain the go-ahead from his superiors to concentrate the 29th Division on a much narrower front than nine miles before he could seriously contemplate an assault across the Roer to capture Jülich and subsequently head for the Rhine. In the meantime, he would cover his sector according to his favorite two up, one back principle, deploying two of his three infantry regiments, 116th on the left and 175th on the right, to guard the division's front along the Roer, while consigning the 115th to divisional reserve.

One of the first activities undertaken by the 29th Division in the new year was marred by tragedy, one of those regrettable accidents for which no one was to blame but occurred regularly on the deadly fringes of no-man's-land in World War II. The 175th Infantry's Company G, commanded by 1st Lt. Hugh Brady, had been manning outposts along a one-mile stretch of the Roer southwest of Jülich for a week. By now Brady knew the sector intimately, and when he received orders to run a patrol across the river after dark on New Year's Day, he entrusted it to 2nd Lt. St. Clair Walker and a few enlisted men, directing them to move north along the only road in his sector to a point on the Roer opposite Jülich.

A twenty-two-year-old native of Louisville, Kentucky, Walker had joined Company G as a replacement officer on December 6 and had yet to see combat. Brady was concerned that the patrol's route would bring it close to the line dividing his own sector and that of the adjacent unit guarding the Roer opposite Jülich, the 116th Infantry's Company E; in the dark Walker and his men could easily be mistaken for prowling Germans. Brady therefore traveled from his command post at a German estate known as Linzenich Gut to warn his counterpart at Company E, Capt. Donald Meabon, that a friendly patrol would be operating in the area along the riverbank. According to a 175th Infantry report called in to the 29th Division war room shortly after midnight on January 2: While [Brady] was there, the [Company E] outpost nearest the river apparently phoned in and told them they saw someone coming on the road. [The outpost] was told by someone in the 116th that it was the Company G patrol coming. [Meabon] sent S/Sgt. George Shaffer down to the outpost to keep them from firing on the patrol. On the way over Shaffer shot and killed Lieutenant Walker. Shaffer claims he challenged Walker and that he didn't answer. Our people said Walker shouted the password twice before he was shot.

According to the 116th Infantry, however, The officer in charge of Company G's patrol was challenged by [our] sentry four times. The officer then got down on his knees and started to crawl. The sentry thought it was a Jerry and shot him through the heart. Whatever actually happened, yet another good 29er was gone, buried like so many before him in the U.S. military cemetery at Margraten, Holland. Walker left behind a young wife, Ellen, who nineteen days later would receive a letter at her home in the Louisville suburb of Anchorage from a 175th Infantry chaplain, Capt. John McKenna. Her husband, McKenna wrote, was killed in action January 1, 1945, in Germany and was buried with a protestant burial service in Holland. The places of burial are being made into permanent memorial cemeteries by our government and are made as beautiful as possible. The heroism displayed by the American soldier in these days continues to amaze the world and surely holds the great promise of a great future for our country. Your husband's sacrifice is helping to build a better world for us all. I share your pride in him.

Mercifully, McKenna said not a word about the circumstances of Walker's death. Walker was so new to the 175th Infantry that the Company G clerk, catching up on his paperwork, noted Walker's arrival (assigned and joined…) and his death (from duty to killed in action…) on the same morning report, separated by just a single line.

Since the 29th Division would remain stationary for an indefinite period, Gerhardt's men needed to prepare defensive positions so strong that if the Germans surged across the Roer on either side of Jülich to repeat the stunning surprise attack they had just carried out in the Ardennes, they would be stopped cold. The 29th Division's top-notch intelligence team under Lt. Col. Paul Krznarich—known universally as Murphy because no one could pronounce his name—announced that such a possibility was remote, but no GI could forget that only three weeks ago the highest reaches of U.S. Army intelligence had also drawn that same conclusion.

Finance, civil affairs, adjutant general, judge advocate, ordnance, quartermaster, provost marshal, and other support troops typically bound to desks formed emergency rifle platoons and fought mock battles against phantom German paratroopers. Military policemen established roadblocks and asked probing questions of unfamiliar GIs on the identities of Joe DiMaggio and Veronica Lake. Camouflage netting was refined so that snooping enemy aircraft could not detect gun positions and command posts. Above all, despite the chilly weather, the 29ers broke a sweat with prolonged use of their GI shovels by digging entrenchments—and then digging some more. There was even a rumor—true, as it turned out—that Monty had ordered the British Army's 43rd Infantry Division to dig in six miles behind the 29th just in case the Germans broke through the American lines again.

Monty needn't have worried: the Germans weren't going anywhere, Gerhardt's staff insisted, and—if they did—no help was needed. The busiest men in the 29th Division throughout January were the members of the 121st Engineer Combat Battalion, the 29th's elite sapper outfit and former component of the District of Columbia National Guard, the proud holder of a Distinguished Unit Citation streamer on its colors for heroism on Omaha Beach. The entire period was devoted to the construction of barrier belts and defensive positions along the main line of resistance and around towns which were integral parts of the division defense plan, the 121st's January action report noted. The primary tasks consisted of erecting wire entanglements, laying minefields (both anti-tank and anti-personnel), and digging various gun emplacements…. A total of 18,254 mines was laid. The 121st's commander, twenty-eight-year-old Lt. Col. Robert Ploger, pointed out to an observer how this work was done: Each mine installation is carefully plotted on paper so that it can be easily found again. Minefields have to be set down in patterns. The mines are laid out, then the engineers go back and bury them, which in the frozen ground is quite a problem. A certain number of the mines are booby-trapped so they cannot be picked up easily.

On the seemingly endless list of challenges the U.S. Army faced in January 1945, no soldier would have placed snow removal high on the list. But that month snow fell in heavy quantities, including one day, January 8, when a nearby Canadian unit noted in its journal that the snowfall at times attained the proportions of a good old Canadian blizzard; and another, January 19, during which an entry in the 29th Division's war room transcript stated, High winds and a blizzard blowing right now. Like all Allied divisions, the 29th was dependent on trucks and jeeps to move materiel from rear-area depots up to the front. If snow blocked the roads, front-line troops could quickly run short of food and, if the enemy attacked, ammunition. A jack-of-all-trades fixture in the 121st's Headquarters Company, thirty-one-year-old M/Sgt. John Hickman, a former Baltimore and Ohio Railroad brakeman with a Grant Wood–style American Gothic face and Virginia farmboy twang, almost single-handedly designed, constructed, and installed jeep- and truck-mounted plows that kept the roads clear even in heavy snows.

The 29th Division's defensive posture was hardly passive, a detail the reviled enemy learned each time they dared to show themselves at the front. Recent events had undeniably fueled the 29ers’ desire to inflict punishment on the enemy. As one soldier wrote home to his wife: "In the Yank [magazine] we got tonight, there was a complete story of the survivors of the massacre at Malmedy, when the Germans shot 150 of the First Army men taken prisoner. [The actual number was 84, but many other American troops and Belgian civilians were murdered nearby.] The details are terrible."

Aside from the normal methods the GIs ordinarily used to mercilessly harass the Germans—sniping, raids, and mortar and artillery barrages—a few novel methods were employed. As related by a story in the division's popular daily newsletter, 29 Let's Go, Company A of the 175th came up with a new twist on the David and Goliath yarn by stretching an old inner tube between the trees and loading their improvised slingshot with fragmentation grenades instead of stones. Directed by 1st Lt. Frank Bishop, the men successfully flung several across the river, actions that no doubt startled the Germans as not a sound was audible until the grenades exploded. Nevertheless, the chance of catching a German so close to the Roer outside of entrenchments was virtually nil. Still, it was undeniably ingenious, but the ordnance people would not be mass producing it anytime soon.

Another 175th invention was labeled the Goslin Grenade after the 3rd Battalion's S-2, 1st Lt. Arthur Goslin. The New Hampshire ‘looey’ [lieutenant] emptied a grenade of its explosive and detonating charges, soldered on improvised grappling hooks, attached 300 yards of heavy telephone cable and proceeded to fire the same [by means of a special propelling cartridge and an M-1 rifle muzzle adapter] at night across the river, wrote Cpl. Jean Lowenthal, editor of 29 Let's Go. Goslin deduced that the German side of the Roer was so thickly covered with barbed wire that when the 29ers pulled their end of the telephone cable sharply backward, the grenade's grappling hooks were sure to catch on the wire. Plenty of noise would be generated, and in the dark the enemy would assume an American patrol was coming through. A lot of effort—and luck—would be required to fool the enemy, and even then the deception would be momentary. But the 29ers had a lot of time on their hands, and as 29 Let's Go reported, Lt. Goslin's chief aim with his new ‘weapon’ was to get the Jerries to reveal their positions, and they did most obligingly, firing everything from tracers to rockets along their outposts. All of which observers on our side plotted accurately on maps.

An American invention that surpassed all others by a wide margin, however, was a gadget so confidential that U.S. Army chief of staff Gen. George Marshall had withheld it from use in Europe for months for fear that the enemy might figure out the secret before large-scale production took place. The device was so cunning that if it worked the way stateside whiz kids promised, American artillery, both field and antiaircraft varieties, would be able to hit almost any enemy target within range with stunning accuracy. The Germans defending the Roer remained blissfully unaware of it, but they were about to learn its capabilities. As soon as the contraption came into use in Europe on New Year's Day 1945, the GIs promptly changed its inscrutable code name—Pozit—to the much more sensible phrase proximity fuze.

James Phinney Baxter, an American academic whose 1946 book Scientists Against Time earned the Pulitzer Prize for history, noted in that work that, aside from the Manhattan Project, the proximity fuze was the most remarkable scientific achievement of the war. Unlike ordinary field artillery and antiaircraft shells, which detonated either by impacting a solid object or upon the expiration of a preset flight time, proximity shells used miniaturized radio transmitters and receivers, supposedly at a cost of only $20 per fuze, to trigger detonations of shells at consistently lethal distances from targets. Bringing down a Luftwaffe warplane with an antiaircraft gun or spraying deadly shell fragments over a stubborn German machine-gun nest with a howitzer would therefore become infinitely easier.

If proximity fuzes worked as intended, they would make an already mighty Allied artillery arm even mightier. In autumn 1944, impressed U.S. Army cannoneers had been sworn to secrecy when they witnessed Pozit demonstrations for the first time, and they waited eagerly for the chance to employ the new fuze. In the 29th Division, that moment came on January 1, 1945. The History of the 110th Field Artillery noted, When the 110th first fired shells with the new fuze, Lt. Col. [John Purley] Cooper [CO, 110th] demonstrated it from an attic observation post in Koslar to the 115th Infantry's entire regimental staff, including the surgeon and the chaplain. Some kinks needed to be worked out, however, as the history observed: The cannoneers found that about 20 percent of the bursts were ‘prematures,’ that is, they exploded high overhead somewhere along the trajectory and long before nearing the target. Such bursts, while terrifically loud, were practically harmless since by the time the fragments neared the ground, they had lost velocity and were falling only with the speed of gravity. Wearing a helmet provided ample protection against the slivers. Since the Pozit's nearly instantaneous bounce-back of the radio transmission to the receiver when a shell neared a solid object set off its detonation, the 29ers learned that tall edifices and trees as well as passing friendly aircraft, heavy rain clouds, and even large birds could set off a premature. Still, assuming sufficient numbers of proximity fuzes would be available once the 29th Division launched its inevitable Roer crossing, enemy resistance could be significantly diminished. Ultimately, American firms produced millions of proximity fuzes, a more than adequate supply for those units in need. As expressed in the Ordnance Department's official World War II history, The triumph of American research lay in successfully designing a fuze that could be manufactured by assembly-line methods.

The German defenders of the Roer were provided with such a paltry ammunition supply that they could not respond to American provocations in any meaningful way. The scarcity of artillery ammunition had increased in such a way since the beginning of December that it was unbearable from the point of view of a soldier, wrote Generalleutnant (Major General) August Dettling, commander of the 363rd Volksgrenadier Division on the Jülich front. There could be no question of our returning artillery fire! Nor was it often possible for us to deal with other targets in the enemy sector, such as motor vehicle columns, troop movements, concentrations, etc.

One cold winter day, an enemy soldier, no doubt frustrated at his inability to retaliate for the Americans’ incessant harassing fire, unwisely attempted to mock the 29th Division's vaunted artillerists. For days, American cannoneers had been vainly striving to score a direct hit on what they assumed was a small, well-camouflaged enemy pillbox near the prominent Broicherhaus manor north of Jülich. The 29th Division's 1948 official history, 29 Let's Go, related: As artillery shells fell short or wide of the pillbox, a German soldier would come out and wave a large red flag, as a ‘Maggie's Drawers.’ [This was Army slang for the distinctive banner waved downrange during target practice to signify a shooter had completely missed the target; the phrase supposedly was drawn from the bawdy song Those Old Red Flannel Drawers That Maggie Wore.] This clowning on the part of the enemy was not well received on the west bank, where it was considered downright impudent and not at all in accordance with the generally accepted customs of war…. A self-propelled 155-millimeter gun [from the 557th Field Artillery Battalion, a XIII Corps unit on loan to the 29th Division], brought up for direct fire, pumped shells into the position [fifty-seven in number, according to one report] and destroyed it.

If the 29ers had to fight a war, they could hardly complain in January 1945 about how the generals had asked them to do it. Certainly the previous seven months, dating back to D-Day, had been infinitely tougher, and the countless number of good doughboys now lying deep in the soil of France, Belgium, and Holland proved it. In January only nine 29ers were killed in action, an agonizing loss to be sure—but compared to Omaha Beach, when GIs had been felled for hours by the enemy's merciless fire like stalks of grain swept up by a John Deere reaper, nine deaths seemed almost trifling to the calloused top brass. St. Lô, Vire, Brest, Würselen, and Bourheim had simply been more of the same under different conditions. In early 1945, however, neither the enemy troops on the far side of the Roer nor German civilians behind the front displayed any of the aggressiveness 29ers had come to expect from Nazis. True, Rhineland weather in midwinter was rough—one day, January 26, reportedly had sub-zero temperatures on the Fahrenheit scale—but thankfully the enemy's passivity allowed 29th Division rifle companies to regularly rotate men from exposed and uncomfortable front-line foxholes along the Roer to the much more habitable confines of an indoor command post in a riverside village. Those smashed-up edifices could hardly match a warm barracks at Fort Meade, but at least the riflemen could thaw their chilled bodies, dry their socks, and sleep in far more comfort than in a cramped slit trench. Even better, to the delight of battalion surgeons, debilitating cases of trench foot and frostbite sharply declined from the alarming numbers of autumn.

Even the bitter cold could not stop the 29ers from concluding that they were more comfortable now than they had been in a long time, a sentiment that had more to do with the total absence of full-scale combat than it did with the weather. The Germans, however, made their usual feeble attempts by means of radio broadcasts and propaganda shells—directed at the poor devils of the 29th Division—to convince their opponents that once combat began again in earnest, as it inevitably would, the Americans’ fleeting comfort would vanish and many good men would die. Who is going to launch out into the new battle? Statesmen, politicians, big bankers, munitions manufacturers? No, not one! a typical Nazi propaganda leaflet blared. Just you: the men of the 8th, 29th, 102nd, and 104th Divisions, average young Americans with your lives ahead.

So frequently were the leaflets dropped on American lines that they were classified as The Daily Mail. As the 175th Infantry's 1st Lt. Joe Ewing remarked, The effect of all this propaganda on American troops was negligible…. They listened and laughed. Ewing confessed, however, Propaganda shells landing in an area were always an occasion of great excitement, and the idea was to ‘get hold of some of those Jerry papers.’ The papers were not only preposterous, but also often featured first-class sketches of unclothed women in the arms of male civilians on the homefront—The Girl You Left Behind…Pretty Joan Hopkins, for more than half a year she had not heard from Bob. Poor little Joan! She is still thinking of Bob, yet she is almost hoping that he'll never return.

Ewing fondly remembered listening to a German woman over the radio, a girl propagandist who used the sweet dreamy approach and sentimental tunes. She had nothing to say about the war, except that it was so terrible. She didn't say that the Americans ought to give up…. She didn't even say that Germany was going to win the war. She just kept playing records and announcing their titles with her honest, wholesome, friendly voice. She was hard to resist, and the 29ers admitted her play on homesickness was effective: "And I just know that you'll remember this. This is the song that you and your girl used to hum when you went walking together down along the river road on lovely nights in spring a